The Environment

It's very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people's views on climate change]. I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side. -Freeman Dyson

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma. -Doris Lessing, June 1992

"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres.

IVL, the Swedish Environment Institute has, on behalf of the Swedish Transport Administration and the Swedish Energy Agency, investigated the climate impact of lithium-ion batteries from a life-cycle perspective...

The report shows that battery manufacturing leads to high CO2 emissions. For each kilowatt-hour storage capacity in the battery, emissions of 150 to 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent are generated, already in the factory...

Two standard electric cars on the market, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, have batteries of approximately 30 kWh and 100 kWh respectively.

As soon as you buy the car, CO2 emissions of approximately 5.3 tonnes and 17.5 tonnes, respectively, have been released for batteries of these sizes. The numbers may be difficult to relate to. By way of comparison, a trip for a person returning from Stockholm to New York by air causes emissions of more than 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide...

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) issued a hasty apology Tuesday after one of its campaign buses was caught dumping human waste from its bathroom into a storm drain. The incident occurred in Lawrenceville, Georgia, an outer suburb of Atlanta. Local citizen Mike Robins saw a DNC bus bearing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign slogan, “Forward Together,” pull up by the curb and start dumping its waste right into a storm drain.

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain -- while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study.

In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe’s commercial carbon trading system -- the largest in the world --thereby undermining that continent’s ambitious carbon reduction achievements.

In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development. But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated.

World's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought - and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong.

The proposed legal change would be announced and widely publicized for an extended period before it came into force. During that time, GW deniers would have a chance to change their ways and escape punishment. The police would start to identify the most influential GW deniers who had not responded to the changed legal situation. These individuals would then be charged and brought to justice.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch. Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its economic benefits to the farming industry.

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000... Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035. "My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years," said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

On the excellent webcast Uncommon Knowledge, Czech president Václav Klaus recently compared “two ideologies” that were “structurally very similar. They are against individual freedom. They are in favor of centralistic masterminding of our fates. They are both very similar in telling us what to do, how to live, how to behave, what to eat, how to travel, what we can do and what we cannot do.” The first of Klaus’s “two ideologies” was Communism—a system with which he was deeply familiar, having participated in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The second was environmentalism. -Benjamin A. Plotinsky

Back in 1995, environmental concerns were viewed through a narrower prism. The salvage logging rider signed by then President Bill Clinton granted timber companies unfettered access to national forests that had been protected under environmental laws. One of the loggers’ first targets was 14-acres of trees in the Warner Creek area of the Willamette National Forest in Eugene, Oregon.

Gore’s transcript documents that during his sophomore year at Harvard he earned a "D" in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature). Also, as a senior at Harvard, he earned a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118. Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on global warming.

HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one third of the Co2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark.

The catastrophists were wrong (again) about the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. There have been no major fish die-offs. On the contrary, a comprehensive new study says that in some of the most heavily fished areas of the Gulf of Mexico, various forms of sea life, from shrimp to sharks, have seen their populations triple since before the spill.

The Peruvian government is planning to file criminal charges against Greenpeace activists who may have permanently scarred the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site during a publicity stunt.

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years. BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. -Erika Lovely

The most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature.

The latest findings are significant because they stand in sharp contrast to a refrain among some environmental campaigners and the media that air pollution is getting worse, and to the assertion that the Bush administration was “rolling back” the Clean Air Act. Final data for 2008 won’t be available for several months, but the EPA’s latest report shows that air pollution levels in every category fell from 2001 to 2007; moreover, air pollution levels in most categories fell at a faster rate than during the first seven years of the Clinton Administration.

It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. -Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics, UCSB

In 2014, the EPA released a photo album titled "A Day In The Life of the EPA Administrator" that shows what McCarthy does on a typical day, including the fact that she flies home nearly every weekend to spend time with her family.

To the left, the families whose lives are ruined are collateral damage to achieve their utopian dream of saving the planet. The Stalinists who now run the green movement believe the ends justify the ruthless means. -Stephen Moore

"Accelerating rates of air pollution could become so serious by the 1980s that many people may be forced on the worst days to wear breathing helmets to survive outdoors..." -Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day